RE: Some blogs are ugly, but many need better accessibility

26 Aug, 2026

I saw the original post generating a bit of talk, and I haven't written many lighter posts lately, so I figured I'd add what I had to say.

First off, OP said:

I would never tell anyone to their face that their blog is ugly

Can't relate. If you use cyan text on a white background, I'm gonna tell you your blog looks like an eyesore. I don't see anything wrong with telling someone their styling makes their blog hard to read, as long as you're not hostile or rude about it.

I also think there's an aesthetic to being intentionally "internet ugly". There are some blogs and sites, like Steve's blog or posting.cool, that invoke that aesthetic to call back to the old days of the internet, where a lot more of the styling and aesthetics of the web was done by amateurs. It wouldn't make much sense to call these ugly, because the ugliness is part of the point, part of the charm.

The best way I've found to deal with bad or distracting CSS is Reader Mode. In Firefox¹ and browsers forked from it, (like Zen Browser, the one I use) you can click a small button in the URL bar to strip all the CSS out and display the main text and image content on the page with simple, clean, and customizable styling. I have mine set up similarly to this blog, white text on a not-quite-#000000 black, but you can set the colors to be whatever you like. It has other features, too, like a TTS reader and a reading time estimate. I find it useful for reading Substack posts, since I like to have text hightlighted while I read to keep my place, and whenever you highlight text Substack throws up that horrible "Share/Quote" pop-up that obscures the part of the text that I'm trying to read. I am a competent netizen, I can copy-paste text on my own, thank you very much. No such problem in Reader Mode.

There's always going to be some tension here, some push-and-pull between what counts as a blogger's personal aesthetic decision and what counts as an accessiblity issue. Sure, there are tools like Reader Mode that can strip out the CSS, but part of the fun of Bearblog and the internet in general is seeing the aesthetic variety of what people make, and part of that is going to be the styling. I don't want a bearblog where everybody has to use the default white-on-dark-blue theme, even though that theme is perfectly nice. Maybe ugly blogs are the price we pay for the freedom to style our blogs how we like.

I will, however, still make fun of your blog for looking terrible. Seriously, cyan on white? Who in their right mind would want to read like that?